Problems with startup

ríomhaire

Hey my GF has had a Macbook Pro for a year and she's having some problems suddenly.

It's taking ages to start up for start. Several minutes at the grey screen with the Apple logo and the loading wheel before going to the desktop. Thing is the desktop it loads has the default wallpaper instead of the one she set and although the mouse appears and is working normally nothing comes up.

The bar at the top doesn't show up and the row of icons at the bottom doesn't show up either when we move the mouse to the bottom of the screen. I don't know any shortcuts other than cmd+Q so I have nothing to do. Currently waiting to see if anything else comes up.


We've come up with two possible causes. One is simply it was dropped recently. I don't think it's that though. It fell off a desk while inside a bag and in a case that's designed to protect it and it worked fine for a while after that happened.

The other thing that's been done recently is that she tried to install a programme called AIPS for labwork using the terminal and FTPing into another computer (I don't actually understand this, these are just the terms she used) but the installation failed. Next time the computer was restarted after that this happened.

HALP PLZ




Edit: More info from my girlfriend

Hey it's girlfriend here. My terminal experience is pretty limited, basically, I'm doing a college research project and had asked a Phd in my lab to help me install this programme AIPS, which runs in the terminal and uses unix. He seemed pretty busy and I figured the least I could do was to have a bash off it myself, so that at least it wouldn't just look like I was asking for help with every little thing :P

The installation asks you to chose a load of settings before actually running, and Mr Phd said that all the settings I had chosen seemed fine and that I should be good to go as far has he was concerned. He told me exactly what to do next (perl install.pl -n) and I did that.

Then the instally thing told me that it had problems ftping to some server and couldn't download some .tar file that it needed (even though I had that file already saved in the directory I was working from). Mr Phd and I decided to leave the installation process until Monday. Out of curiosity, however, he asked me to try ftp'ing to another computer in the lab, just to see if there was a general problem with my computer's ftp ability.

He told me exactly what to do, and I followed his instructions. It didn't work, so obviously that's a problem that my computer has anyway (but it's not firewall-related, I briefly turned off my firewall and tried running the ftp command to yer man's computer again, and it still didn't work).

Sad Professor

I haven't a clue about that Unix program, but if the machine was dropped recently the hard drive might be on its way out. It's the most likely thing to go in the case of a fall. If the hard drive is failing you'll usually hear it struggling (clicking, grinding noises, etc) during startup.

Tell her to boot from the install disc, run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and verify the hard disk. If (like most people) she foolishly threw the install disc away, tell her to boot into safe mode by holding the shift key on startup. If the machine can't boot in safe mode either then the hard drive is probably f**ked.

ríomhaire

We're not hearing any unusual noises.

She restarted it and now it's stuck on the grey loading screen with the mac icon. ****.

Duck Soup

Isn’t there a ‘check hardware’ option on Disk Warrior? Can’t do any harm to boot up from a DW disc (if you can lay your hands on one) and see what it says.

taylorconor95

You know you can just right click the finder icon and click connect to server to make sure the connection is working, that would eliminate one possible fault...

By the sounds of things dropping your mac while in a well insulated case has absoloutly nothing to do with this thing.

By the sounds of things finder.app is either frozen or not running. When the mouse and desktop background show up try the command: cmd-alt-esc to see if you can throw up the finder's force quit app window. If that comes up, restart finder. If not, you have a problem

I still cant see however how installing a simple perl script could do this much damage... When you say the installation failed, what happened exactly?

Greentree_uk

Def sounds like the hard drive has gone.

muggyog

Try starting in single user mode ( Press the 'apple' and 'S' keys while powering up). Follow the onscreen instructions on how to do a fsck ( file system check) and see does it repair anything.

single user mode (Verbose mode will show if the drive cant mount)
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1492

fsck (the 'y' switch is not strictly necessary)
http://reubania.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/sbinfsck-fy/

ríomhaire

Sorry for abondoning this thread. I've been pretty damn busy and I just forgot about it. Anyway the issue is sort of sorted. She brought it to the shop and they said something like:
The SATA connection between the motherboard and harddrive is broken and they're going to replace it using the one for the DVD drive. So basically it should be fixed fine but now she won't have a working disc drive.

I hope that made sense and I didn't get it mixed up. Thanks for the replies anyway!

Greentree_uk

I'd love to know which shop you brought it to. cause that just isn't possible.

Sata cable could well be faulty but you can't use the one from the dvd drive

muggyog

Agree with Greentree. What model number is it? Be surprised if the cable suddenly went faulty ( unless someone opened it and broke it!).